Shawn Shieh

Shawn Shieh has been Deputy Director at the Hong Kong-based labor rights organization China Labour Bulletin (CLB) since 2014. From 2007-2014, he lived in Beijing, where he founded and directed the English-language operations for China Development Brief (CDB), a bilingual, independent media platform covering China’s civil society and philanthropy sector. At CDB and CLB, Shieh’s work focused on strengthening China’s grassroots, independent NGO sector.

Shawn received his Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University in 1996, and was a professor of political science at Marist College from 1995-2009. He has written and published extensively on China’s political economy, corruption, and civil society. He serves as a China consultant for the U.S.-based International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, and in his spare time he maintains a blog on NGOs in China.

The day after the Party Congress ended on October 24, Xi Jinping strode across the stage of the massive Great Hall of the People with the six newly announced members of the 19th Politburo Standing Committee, the body that rules China. What might...

After a slow start, the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) and its provincial Public Security Bureaus (PSBs) seem to be finding their stride in implementing the Foreign NGO Law with the rate of registering representative offices and filing “temporary...

The Beijing-based China Development Brief's (CDB’s) English-language website came out last month with more news about the implementation of the Foreign NGO Law in Yunnan, Shanghai, Sichuan, and Guangdong, where a large number of foreign NGOs...

For many years, the vast majority of foreign NGOs operated quietly in China in a legal grey area. Many are unregistered and work in China through local partners, while others are registered as commercial enterprises. That all changed with the...

Donald J. Trump, president-elect of the United States, spent much of his antagonistic campaign blaming China for many of America’s economic ills, and repeatedly making thinly veiled threats of a U.S. trade war with Beijing. How should Trump engage...